Respond to these rapid questions in our The Farewell quiz and we will tell you which The Farewell character you are. Play it now.
This week, you can choose from a number of excellent Cold War espionage thrillers that are hitting theaters: In addition to Phillip Noyce’s fantastical action spectacle “Salt,” which stars Angelina Jolie as an ice-cool acrobatic superspy who must confront long-dormant sleeper cells of Russian agents in the United States, Christian Carion’s “Farewell” tells the true story of two men, a Frenchman and a former KGB colonel, who smuggled Soviet secrets to the West and helped put an end “to a world
Both films have their share of ridiculous elements, such as President Reagan’s proposed “Star Wars” missile defense system, which is presented in Carion’s film as a cleverly outlandish strategic bluff by the Soviet Union. This real-life affair, which was dubbed “Farewell” by the French intelligence service as a result of the Soviet leaker’s code name, has something that you don’t see very often: an endorsement blurb from none other than President Ronald Reagan himself, who called it “one of the most important espionage cases of the twentieth century.”
The plot of (For Your Eyes Only — Burn After Reading) begins in 1981 and revolves around the efforts of Sergei Gregoriev (played by Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, who directed the Cannes Film Festival winners “When Father Was Away on Business” and “Underground”) to overthrow his country’s failed communist system for personal as well as patriotic reasons. “This country must change if it is to survive,” he is adamant. Igor, his typically sullen teenage son, is obsessed with cassettes of “decadent Western music,” such as Queen and David Bowie, and is as disillusioned with Brezhnev as he is with his father. He secretly hopes to provide a better life for Igor, who is a typical sullen teenager.
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Gregoriev recruits Pierre Froment (played by Guillaume Canet, director of the exceptional thriller “Tell No One”), a reluctant French businessman living with his family in Moscow, to smuggle high-level intelligence out of the country. Froment is adamant that he will not cooperate. Indeed, he is such an unlikely spy that he is virtually immune to suspicion due to his status as a complete amateur. In “Farewell,” the story of their covert operation, the emotional effects of the secrets these men keep from their wives and families, and the political implications of their revelations to leaders at the highest levels of government in France, the Soviet Union, and the United States are all interwoven together.
The Farewell Quiz
The two main characters are played by film directors, and director Carion has a lot of fun exploring the areas where movies and real life collide, whether it’s President Reagan (Fred Ward) obsessing over the shift in perspective (from James Stewart to John Wayne) at the end of John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” or Gregoriev watching 8mm family home movies projected into the corner of the ceiling, so that they appear as if on the insipid screen of his
Also, you will find out which character are you in this The Farewell quiz.
Another aspect of Carion’s strategy is that it is focused on the future. The kinds of striking little things you notice in the world and think to yourself, “Someone should put this in a movie,” such as the way light filters through trees (from the sun or a helicopter spotlight), the way a face illuminated for a split second in the backseat of a parked car at night, or the kite spotted by a driver who’s driving with his head out the side window, are all things he looks for in his films.
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During one of the film’s brief scenes, Igor (Evgenie Kharlanov), while listening to Queen’s “We Will Rock You” on his new Sony Walkman, stands on a picnic table in the middle of a fern field and imagines himself as Freddie Mercury onstage, the film’s main character. While this private moment has little to do with the film’s plot, it is impossible not to notice that it, more than anything else, heralds the impending demise of the Soviet system when you are witnessing it in person.Also, you must try to play this The Farewell quiz.
For more personality quizzes check this: Charlies Angels Quiz.
